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Member of SPARKS Scene Piracy Group Pleads GuiltyErnesto Van der Sar, 14 Jan 09:54 PM Last year, the US Department of Justice booked one of its bigg

Member of SPARKS Scene Piracy Group Pleads Guilty Ernesto Van der Sar, 14 Jan 09:54 PM Last year, the US Department of Justice booked one of its biggest successes in its battle against online piracy. In August, law enforcement upset the international piracy ecosystem by taking out a prominent Scene group, which was the source for many pirated movies and TV-shows. SPARKS Raids Throw Piracy Scene in Turmoil With help from international law enforcement partners, several raids and arrests were carried out, with the SPARKS group at the center of it all. The authorities later confirmed that three people had been indicted with all facing 'copyright infringement conspiracy' charges. The crackdown didn't just affect these three but it hit the entire warez Scene. Dozens of topsites are believed to be taken down in the raids and many more halted their operations as a precaution, which significantly reduced the volume of pirate releases. With many of the court records not being available, it is hard to track the progress of the case. However, this week one of the defendants, Jonatan Correa (aka 'Raid'), appeared in court before US District Court Judge Richard M. Berman. Correa was the only defendant arrested in the US last summer. After being placed in custody in Kansas, the defendant was released on a $75,000 bail bond the next day. Initially, he maintained his innocence and pleaded not guilty but that changed yesterday. SPARKS Member Pleads Guilty During a hearing via a telephone conference yesterday, Correa changed his earlier statement. The defendant signed a plea agreement with the US Government and pleaded guilty to the copyright infringement conspiracy charge. Among other things, Correa admits to conspiring with other members of the SPARKS group to commit copyright infringement. According to the indictment, that involved obtaining pre-release Blu-ray discs from wholesale distributors several weeks before their retail release date. During the hearing, Correa admitted that he ripped these discs and uploaded the pirated videos to a co-conspirator's server, located in Westchester County. From there, these files were distributed further, eventually ending up on public sites. This allegedly cost the movie industry millions of dollars in damages. At the time of writing the plea agreement isn't publicly available. This means that details are scarce at this point. US Government attorney Andrew Chan did mention during the hearing that they have ample evidence, including financial records and photos of the obtained discs, taken from the defendant's email account. Correa informed the judge that he is fully aware of the consequences of his guilty plea. He further agreed to waive several rights and promised to fully cooperate with the Government's preparation of a presentence investigation report. Correa Faces Prison Sentence In theory, a conviction for a copyright infringement conspiracy is punishable by five years imprisonment and a maximum fine of $250,000. However, both parties agreed to a sentencing guideline of 12 to 18 months for Correa, taking his cooperation and criminal history into account. The court scheduled the Sparks defendant to be sentenced in May and it's likely that more details will become available before that date. The two other defendants, George Bridi from Great Britain and Norway resident Umar Ahmad (aka 'Artist'), haven't appeared in US court. According to the information we have available, Bridi has yet to be extradited from Cyprus where he was previously detained while Ahmad is still at large. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. The Pirate Bay is Pretty Broken Right Now But Can Be Coaxed Back to Life Andy Maxwell, 14 Jan 11:59 AM In file-sharing terms, The Pirate Bay has been around almost forever. Launched in 2003, the torrent index has overcome every hurdle put in its way while other competitors have succumbed to various pressures. Indeed, even after all these years, The Pirate Bay is still a file-sharing giant. As revealed in our latest list of most visited torrent site, the site is still at the top of the heap, successfully pulling in more traffic than rivals including YTS.mx, 1337x, and RARBG. But, just two weeks into the year, The Pirate Bay is currently giving off distress signals that are not only rendering the site unusable for the average user but also making it an extremely confusing experience for anyone, even those with the patience to persevere. Content is Still Being Uploaded While some users may visit The Pirate Bay looking for specific named content, there are millions who return to the site looking for the latest content recently uploaded. This is achievable by pressing the 'Recent Torrents' button on the homepage and the feature works pretty much as expected. But while new content is still being uploaded every day, visitors will notice that The Pirate Bay's ability to determine how many seeds and leechers there are on each torrent is completely broken. While not a guaranteed method of determining a high-quality torrent, these statistics are extremely useful when making the decision of which torrent to obtain. At the moment there is no useful data, and this is a problem on a couple of fronts. No Seed and Leech Information Causing Issues More seeds usually translate to faster downloads, something which all torrent users like to enjoy wherever possible. With no indication on the site, information that would allow users to pick the best or most popular/favored torrent is removed from the equation. The small but significant plus point for file-sharers, however, is that just because The Pirate Bay isn't displaying seed and leech data, it doesn't necessarily follow that they don't exist in the countless thousands of swarms as well. They are still there, it's just that the site isn't showing them at the moment. And that leads to other problems too. The Top 100 Torrents List Visitors who browse the site looking for something interesting without a specific idea of what they want are often guided by the popularity of torrents, i.e the number of seeds and leechers. Since we know that the site can't provide those stats at the moment, there's a huge knock-on effect for all of the features on the site that rely on that data to provide search results. For example, those who like to browse the Top 100 Torrents list are now faced with a list of torrents from 16 years ago, with shows like South Park and Friends plus Xbox 360 games topping the list. This makes it pretty clear that without the seeds and leechers count, The Pirate Bay's code defaults to displaying the oldest content first. The only way to partially solve the problem is by using the '48HR' option on The Pirate Bay's search page to select specific content that has only been uploaded during the last two days. That seems to work but with the seeds and leechers stats still missing, it's a more laborious affair than usual and the user experience suffers tremendously as a result. Browsing Torrents Still Works, Kind of… Selecting the 'Browse Torrents' link on the main page still leads to the option to wander through the Pirate Bay's indexes by content type, i.e movies, music or TV shows. The other plus is that the site shows the most-recently uploaded content first, which is what many users are looking for. Yet again, however, the lack of any seed and leecher count severely disrupts the user's ability to make an informed choice when selecting a torrent. These numbers are often taken for granted but this technical issue appears to be fundamental to the site's current problems. We haven't seen the site's code but looking at the current chaos, addressing what should be a relatively minor fix might bring the entire site back to functionality. That raises the prospect of a fairly rapid return to form. When TPB's operator gets round to it. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. ©2021 TorrentFreak | Office 21338 PO Box 4336 Manchester, North West M61 0BW United Kingdom Web Version   Preferences   Forward   Unsubscribe     Powered by Mad Mimi®A GoDaddy® company